Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Agent |
Your reply left Zendesk and never arrived. Before guessing, look at the ticket: Zendesk records the failure there and names the recipient and the reason.
Symptoms
- A customer says they received nothing, and the ticket shows the reply was sent.
- It happens with one customer or one domain in particular.
- It started after a change to your domain or a new brand.
Resolution steps
1. Look for the failure on the ticket itself
A ticket whose outbound email failed gets the tag system_email_notification_failure, and warning messages appear beneath the comment in the conversation log. Click the warning icon to see which recipient did not receive it and why, with the SMTP error code.
Two things to know. The tag can take up to five days to appear, because Zendesk retries temporarily failed messages during that period, so a same-day check may show nothing. And the interface distinguishes between one recipient failing, some, and all, which immediately tells you whether this is about the customer or about you.
Build a view on that tag. It turns "a customer says they got nothing" from a report you wait for into a list you check.
2. Was the comment internal?
Worth ruling out before anything technical. An internal note is never sent, and the ticket looks much the same at a glance.
3. Are SPF and DKIM right for that exact domain?
Without them, receiving servers treat your mail as suspicious. Check the records are present and verified for the domain the reply was sent from, which for a second brand is a different domain from your first.
If a whole domain is affected rather than one person, this is nearly always the answer.
4. Did it land in their spam folder?
Ask them to look. If it is there, step three is usually behind it. Zendesk lists being flagged as spam by the recipient's mail server as one of the documented failure causes.
5. Is the address valid, or the mailbox full, or the message too large?
These are the other documented causes, and the error code from step one distinguishes them. A full mailbox and a non-existent address produce very different codes and very different conversations.
6. Did their mail system reject it?
Corporate filters block on attachments, on links, or on reputation. Their IT can see the rejection in their own logs, and you cannot, so this is the point at which the fastest route is asking them.
Whole domain affected? That is nearly always authentication rather than anything about the individual message. Send us the domain and what you are seeing and we will check the records with you.
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